Area Community college graduates score perfect on nursing exams

February 2, 2014

Perfection is a pretty high standard, but graduates of the one-year Practical Nursing and two-year Associate Degree Nursing programs at both Ellsworth Community College and Marshalltown Community College have hit the mark for the second year in a row!

The 2012 nursing graduate NCLEX exam data, just released this month, shows that ECC and MCC students earned perfect 100% test scores on the NCLEX exams required for professional licensure.

For Practical Nursing graduates, the Iowa pass rate is 94.83% and the national pass rate is 84.23%. For Associate Degree Nursing graduates, the Iowa pass rate is 90.24% and the national pass rate is 90.34%. All Iowa community colleges offer both practical nursing and associate degree nursing, but only one other college besides ECC and MCC had 100% passage rates for both nursing programs. In addition, 17 public or private four-year colleges offer the associate degree nursing (RN) program; of those, only four achieved 100% pass rates for all 2012 graduates.

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"Nursing is a very popular degree program, and it's a career area with terrific job prospects virtually everywhere in the country," explains Linda Hanson, Associate Dean of Health Occupations. "We are very proud of our faculty members and graduates. Our faculty work diligently to achieve this kind of quality instruction, and the results speak for themselves. Likewise, our students come into these programs knowing that we hold the bar high, and once again they've risen to the challenge.